Sorry, if I ask something that was asked once. But I wasn't able to find an satisfying answer.

I have the following understanding problem:

In the lower right corner there is a small diagram-like thing that shows the CPU usage. Sometimes I think the current CPU utilization is 98% or 99%. But in the next minute the diagram splits itself up into two areas with a horizontal dividing line and it looks like only 48% or 49% percent is used. Sometimes it even splits up into three or four areas.

At first I thought this is an display error caused by a wrong graphics card driver.

The problem is: I don't understand what % usage is being displayed. In how many areas can the diagram split itself up? And when is 100% reached?

in the console shows the xload values . There is no percentage limit . Lupu-5 with openbox and fbpanel had a cpu meter instead of a load meter in the tray ._________________«Give me GUI or Death» -- I give you [[Xx]term[inal]] [[Cc]on[s][ole]] .
Macpup user since 2010 on full installations.
People who want problems with Puppy boot frugal

...to be honest, I still have no clue how to interpret this diagram in the lower right corner. Even if it has something to do with the number of processes I can't figure it out...I just want to understand what the diagram wants to tell me...

Same here.
I get the idea that the more lines there are, the more processes...
Or is it threads?
So more processes tends to result in a higher % of processor usage...
But not necessarily?

/proc/loadavg
The first three fields in this file are load average figures
giving the number of jobs in the run queue (state R) or waiting
for disk I/O (state D) averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes. They
are the same as the load average numbers given by uptime(1) and
other programs. The fourth field consists of two numbers sepa-
rated by a slash (/). The first of these is the number of cur-
rently executing kernel scheduling entities (processes,
threads); this will be less than or equal to the number of CPUs.
The value after the slash is the number of kernel scheduling
entities that currently exist on the system. The fifth field is
the PID of the process that was most recently created on the
system.

a) True and partly you can . CPU is working always . Finished programs and their finished commands aren't in the queue anymore, thus making the CPU work less . If you run a program that calls itself in a never ending loop without any sleep value inside the loop for example, the loadavg easily might reach values up to 10 and more :